Brandon Weichert: “The US was not supposed to be an adventuring imperial power traveling abroad in search of monsters to destroy. "The reason I wrote the book is because last year, the Trump administration announced in their "National Security Strategy" memo and then again in their "National Defense Strategy" memo: Judge us by the wars we don't fight, not the wars we do fight. That's what they said. And we're going to focus, they said, on the Western Hemisphere. Now, obviously the Donero Doctrine is not what I thought, but the idea that we're going to do a defense of the Western Hemisphere in addition to focusing on domestic issues here in the United States, that's what I thought was Trump's agenda, the Trump Doctrine, if you will. But then by the 28th of February, as you know, the whole thing changed. It's like the president hasn't even read his National Security Strategy memo. So I felt compelled to write a book that reminded readers why we're not supposed to be this expeditionary, adventurous imperial power, going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, as John Quincy Adams once said, and we're supposed to be focused much closer to home. And now it is an international tripolar system, with a multipolar trend. You can already say that it is multi-polar, but there are really three main powers at the moment that are military and economic, and they are the United States, China and Russia. We need to have a better strategy than the one we used since 1991, because it was based on hegemony. Well, we can't be bossy anymore. We have spheres of influence, and we will have to enforce those spheres of influence. Chinese do it in their part of the world. Russians do this in their part of the world. We didn't do it in our part of the world. And the main thing here is when I say enforce the sphere of influence, it is not first of all military.

Brandon Weichert: “The US was not supposed to be an adventuring imperial power traveling abroad in search of monsters to destroy. "The reason I wrote the book is because last year, the Trump administration announced in their "National Security Strategy" memo and then again in their "National Defense Strategy" memo: Judge us by the wars we don't fight, not the wars we do fight. That's what they said. And we're going to focus, they said, on the Western Hemisphere. Now, obviously the Donero Doctrine is not what I thought, but the idea that we're going to do a defense of the Western Hemisphere in addition to focusing on domestic issues here in the United States, that's what I thought was Trump's agenda, the Trump Doctrine, if you will. But then by the 28th of February, as you know, the whole thing changed. It's like the president hasn't even read his National Security Strategy memo. So I felt compelled to write a book that reminded readers why we're not supposed to be this expeditionary, adventurous imperial power, going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, as John Quincy Adams once said, and we're supposed to be focused much closer to home. And now it is an international tripolar system, with a multipolar trend. You can already say that it is multi-polar, but there are really three main powers at the moment that are military and economic, and they are the United States, China and Russia. We need to have a better strategy than the one we used since 1991, because it was based on hegemony. Well, we can't be bossy anymore. We have spheres of influence, and we will have to enforce those spheres of influence. Chinese do it in their part of the world. Russians do this in their part of the world. We didn't do it in our part of the world. And the main thing here is when I say enforce the sphere of influence, it is not first of all military.